“It was twenty years ago today / Sgt Pepper taught the band to play” … well, today’s the 20th birthday of Seinfeld episode #139, October 17, 1996. This was the famous segment where Elaine looked in her chart and found she’d been marked “Difficult.” What followed was hysterical, as she got lied to and ultimately recruited Kramer to impersonate a doctor (“Doctor Van Nostrum”) to get her records.

You see, when this episode aired, Elaine did not have the right to see her chart. The HIPAA law had been passed in August 1996 by the legislative branch, but the regulations giving her access rights had not been created yet by the executive branch.

Well, things have changed, and change can be good … and in a delicious twist, the OpenNotes people got me to impersonate Kramer impersonating a doctor, in a new video mashup. Enjoy.

Next Monday, June 27, I’ll be doing something really fun: an evening keynote at a medical conference in Geneva, Switzerland, open to the public. If you know anyone who can get there, please invite them! It’s just 20 Swiss francs (about US$21), and simultaneous translation will be offered.

The conference is NI2016 (Nursing Informatics 2016), whose theme this year is “eHealth For All.” My talk is from 6:20 to 7:20 pm, followed at 8 by a fashion show featuring wearable technology.

The conference will provide simultaneous translation into German and French, and a delegation from China will have its own simultaneous translator.

I’ll take a moment here to mention four international editions of my signature book Let Patients Help, because of the international nature of this event – and because three translators will be present:

French, German and Chinese editions
(and Spanish)

Let Patients Help is available in eight languages, a real sign that participatory medicine is not just an American thing – it’s becoming a global movement. In addition to English, four languages are relevant to this event:

Christine Bienvenu

French: Impliquons les Patients!
Christine Bienvenu (right), translator of the French Kindle edition, would love to find a publisher or sponsor for a print edition. Come meet her!

German: Lasst Patienten mithelfen! is Part 1 of the German e-patient textbook Gesundheit 2.0.

Chinese: 请患者参与(available only in China … this may be of interest to the Chinese delegation)

Spanish: ¡Dejad que los pacientes ayuden! I mention this because its translators, Elia Gabarron and Luis Fernandez Luque, will also be present.

One of my favorite sayings about digital health is “When assets digitize, things change fast.” The point is that once information (or anything else, even fonts) goes digital it can suddenly be hundreds of times faster to develop new things. In health and care, a special kind of liberation becomes possible: if the person who has the problemcan suddenly invent things, what becomes possible?

Did you know it’s not unusual for a basically health person with diabetes to die in their sleep? I never heard that until I got to know people in the DOC (diabetes online community). (Amazing what happens when you talk to the person who has the problem, eh?) That’s why I want awareness of what diabetes is, and awareness of this amazing project, to spread way beyond the usual diabetes community.

So early in this interview I ask Dana to briefly explain what the pancreas does, why it does it, and what goes wrong if it doesn’t work, which (I assure you) will lead you to understand why people with this disease might say “WeAreNotWaiting.” (If you don’t know that phrase, google it.)

If you’re like me, this will be puzzling and maybe a little bit unsettling, because people are saying it’s going to change the world, but it’s not at all clear what it even is, much less why it would change the world.

But I understand enough about it now to say (with reasonable(?) confidence) that they’re right, but it’ll be years before we all see it happening.

This is not specific to healthcare, but it will surely show up in health information.

It’s called blockchain, and the Wikipedia article on it doesn’t help much. But that’s why I like the two minute video I found last week (above), from the Institute for the Future…. how? Why, via Twitter, of course – hat tip to @Sasanof (David Grayson) for his tweet! Please click to watch it. (Email subscribers, if you can’t see the video, click the headline to come online.)

For some reason I’ve spoken about this a lot in speeches for more than a year but I haven’t blogged about it. The time has come.

One of my sayings in Let Patients Help is a lesson we learned in graphic arts, and the music industry learned too: “When assets digitize, things change fast.” This is, truly, an extraordinary example.

Some people with diabetes pretty much do as their doctors tell them and the industry tells them – they wait and hope that things will get better. That’s fine with me – I never say that people should be more like me. But when someone wants to take a more active role, I believe society (including medicine) should not stand in the way: let patients help improve healthcare.

I’m at the 7th annual Health Datapalooza event in Washington. What I have to say here about this conference is subjective, my gut feel, because I haven’t been at most of the previous ones, because they were largely about the business side of health data – there hasn’t been nearly enough focus on the people who actually have the problem: the patient and family.

This year’s different. It’s managed by a different organization (Academy Health), and a lot of strong patient voices are involved, on stage and behind the scenes. There’s a whole Consumer Track, in addition to all the business things going on. And yesterday we saw a speech by somebody who most definitely fits the category “the people who have the problem.”

Vice President Joe Biden’s son Beau died a year ago this month of glioblastoma, a nasty nasty brain cancer. For his talk I left the main room and went to a side viewing room so I could record it on my iPad.